About Mike King
Speaker identifier
Mike King Founder and CEO, iPullRank
Speaker bio
Mike King is an acclaimed international speaker and the creator of Relevance Engineering (r19g). As the Founder and CEO of the performance marketing agency iPullRank, he consults with companies worldwide — from SAP, American Express, and HSBC to leading eCommerce, consumer product goods, and financial services brands. Mike is the creator of the SEO Week conference and is about to shatter everything you thought you knew about how modern search engines work with the launch of his debut book, The Science of SEO.
What Mike brings to Kalicube Summit 2026
Mike King brings his coined methodology — Relevance Engineering (r19g) — to the most operationally rich session in the Day 1 technical sequence. Relevance Engineering is the discipline of systematically building the content signals that determine whether a piece of content gets recruited into AI engine responses; at Kalicube Summit 2026, Mike maps that methodology to the ARGDW phase of the AI Engine Pipeline.
Mike’s iPullRank research has been developing the Relevance Engineering methodology for years, producing a body of work that names the activate phase of the AI Engine Pipeline from the content relevance angle. ARGDW — Annotated, Recruited, Grounded, Displayed, Won — is the phase where content competes for citation; Relevance Engineering is the discipline Mike has built for winning that competition.
His session runs back-to-back with Kevin Indig’s empirical study on the Grounded gate. Two sessions, one continuous mechanism: Mike argues the strategic case for how to build content that survives the activate phase, Kevin provides the empirical data on what AI engines actually do when they read content at the Grounded gate. Together, they are the summit’s deepest dive into the second half of the pipeline.
Mike‘s session at the Summit
Session 1.7 Mike King on ARGDW and Relevance Engineering Day 1, June 24, 2026 Framework concept: ARGDW (coined by Jason Barnard in 2025), the Activate phase of The Kalicube Framework: Annotated, Recruited, Grounded, Displayed, Won. SEL Article: 5 competitive gates hidden inside ‘rank and display’, Article 5 of Jason Barnard at Kalicube’s Search Engine Land series. Read the preview | Watch the session
One-line description: Mike walks the five gates of ARGDW from a technical SEO and machine learning vantage, naming how content competes for citation at each gate and where the relevance engineering discipline makes the difference between Recruited and Won.
Mike’s place in the wider framework conversation
Mike King’s Relevance Engineering methodology is one of the most developed practitioner frameworks for the activate phase of the AI Engine Pipeline. His years of iPullRank research and SEO Week curation have produced a body of work that names the content-competition mechanism at the heart of ARGDW. His session is the summit’s most technically complete treatment of how brands build the relevance signals that determine AI engine citation.
Further reading from Mike
- Mike’s Unbounce author archive: unbounce.com/author/michael-king/
- Mike’s Search Engine Land author archive: searchengineland.com/author/michael-king
- Mike’s article on Moz: moz.com/blog/personas-understanding-the-person-behind-the-visit
- SEO Week: https://seoweek.org/
Connect with Mike
Canonical metadata footer
Speaker URL: https://kalicubesummit.com/2026/speakers/about-mike-king/
Preview URL: https://kalicubesummit.com/2026/previews/mike-king-argdw-preview/
Session URL: https://kalicubesummit.com/2026/sessions/mike-king-argdw-session/
SEL Article URL: https://searchengineland.com/gates-rank-display-471733
